Good experience. Diff. people may have different experience. You are really lucky to have this one. Congratulations.

hi, Daniel,

yeah, that's called the 'trance' or 'transcendent' state of being. that's one of the whole points of meditating -- to get to that place where there is NO thinker, NO thought, and NO object of thinking. (lights are on, no one's home.) you KNOW you're not asleep but you also know (Who knows? the god consciousness within you) that you're not awake.

so where are you!?????

you're in the state of samadhi. samadhi -- literally meaning, 'evenness of awareness' -- means the three-part normal consciousness state, where there is a separation of attention, into the observer, the object of observation, and the process of observation. ie, I'm Alx, I know that I'm writing to you, Daniel, and the interaction between us is writing, right now.

but when you're in the samadhi state, the transcendental consciousness state, the three-part process of normal consciousness COLLAPSES into one point. there is no observer, no observed, and no process of observation. you have -- your consciousness has -- literally transcended the day-to-day thinking process.

your consciousness has gone into the Shiva, the unbounded sky, the cosmic consciousness that permeates everything and is the backdrop for this creation.

this, btw, is one of the goals of meditation and it's what the spiritual masters mean by saying one should meditate by 'going beyond thought.'

going beyond thought doesn't mean stopping your mind from thinking by natural means. it means, achieving the state of samadhi, and super-naturally the thoughts dissolve on their own as you contact the Silence from which all thought originates.

you can't brute-force it, it happens when it happens. you can't sustain that state longer than your system can handle, esp in the beginning stages, where you're there for a few minutes and then jolted back to your normal consciousness. you can't 'make it happen' -- but you can identify it properly when it DOES happen, and recognize that your meditation process has gone to a deeper level.

the beauty of that state, too, is that it is timeless. literally, beyond time. how long were you there? (or, NOT there!?!!!!!) was it ten minutes? twenty? an hour? there is no way to know because time, also, has no role in that place of ultimate Silence.

there's also another conversation about what happens when you contact that state, and after you come back from it.

the basic point is this: by contacting the cosmic, there, in the deep Silence, you're triggering a purification in your system. purification means -- karmas are starting to spin off and wash out of your system -- physically, emotionally, as well as at the soul level.

(this is another goal of meditation -- purifying the system from whatever karmas are clouding it over.)

this is why we can't STAY in the samadhi state, in the beginning stages of this kind of meditation -- because the system isn't sufficiently purified to allow our consciousness to remain there.

it's like when you go to sleep, and as your body relaxes, it starts to unstress, and maybe you feel your limbs twitching a little. or we have crazy dreams that are spinning off whatever stress we experienced during the day.

the moment we go into deep rest, the system starts to throw off its stresses.

meditation in the samadhi state is a similar mechanism on a deeper level -- the rest given the human system by meditation is usually about twice more than normal sleep.

so the system -- in meditation -- immediately starts to throw off whatever stress, negativity, karmas, it has and wants to release.

this means that when we come out of the samadhi state, the mind may be going a little wild, so many thoughts and ideas and daydreams and confusing conversations going on inside. (this is a symptom of purification -- the mind is responding to the whole system's de-stressing.)

or we may experience deep emotions, or relive traumatic situations in our life. we may perceive some past-life strains, or even physical problems that we had years before.

the whole system is purifying.

the thing to remember is that the over-active thoughts, feelings, or physical symptoms, are just passing through on their way OUT of our system. the way a bad dream seems really gripping and true, but then it goes by, and then we wake up and it's over.

so don't get caught thinking that the thoughts, or feelings, or physical symptoms that come in the wake of touching the samadhi state are real -- they're not, it's just purification.

this is actually a GREAT symptom of meditation -- when the purification really starts to escalate.

later, you'll find that when you meditate, more and more you're in the samadhi state for longer and longer periods of time.

when I started meditating, in the early 1990s, my meditations were deep and included some taste of the samadhi state. usually for a few minutes at a time, but enough to leave me thinking, "jeez, what was THAT? and where was I?" it was like a blank -- and then *I* was back again........

then I went to India, where we meditated on average about 10 hours a day for months and months and months at a time. after about a year, I would go into samadhi for 30 or 45 minutes at a time. (this is when I started laying down to meditate, because sitting up was a waste of time -- I would wind up laying down, anyway!)

these days, when I meditate, I'm often 'gone' for a few hours at a time. I'm not asleep, I'm not awake. I'm in the samadhi state -- perfectly recognizable as a different state of consciousness, what Patanjali called "Turiya", the fourth state, different from waking, sleeping, or dreaming.

and from the samadhi state -- amazing things can happen. when you get functional being in that place of no-being, you can heal other people quickly with just a thought, you can create divine things in this world, you can experience your deep god nature with nothing else in the way.

it is beautiful.

I'm glad you're experiencing it -- keep meditating! you're on to the experiences that yogis since the beginning of human history have enjoyed and talked about, and tried their best to share with humanity.

namaste,

Alx